Imaginary (Collaboration)
"Imaginary" is a short animated film created primarily by myself and Robyn Pennypacker. We handed the audio work over to Ed Foose, but besides that, Robyn and I split the art and animation about 50/50.
First and foremost we wanted to create a good story about something we cared about; an imaginary friend became a cool tool for telling a "coming-of-age" story. And secondly, we wanted to combine 3D backgrounds with 2D character animation. That's just where we were with out education: we wanted to practice 2D character animation some more, and I was itching to do something 3D.
Robyn and I both roughed out the story together, but after we settled on some storyboards, we split up: I started modeling the 3D backgrounds, while she produced a timed-out animatic. Then, it came time to animate, I handled the imaginary friend while she animated the boy.
Lighting a Shot
“Alright! Let’s light this shot.
How hard can it be?
Oh...”
This post is copy/pasted from the production blog for Imaginary; I'm posting this way after the fact. But this is from me going through a crash course of lighting, volume fog shaders, mental ray lights... it was honestly pretty cool! But to be self-critical, this isn't the best render I've ever done (should've sampled that fog a little more).
I was fine with keeping things basic and super simple for the models, and even the lighting with the idea "ehhh, we'll just paint over it", because we were just going to paint over the backgrounds. But due to time, we decided the renders could stand on their own (with some After Effects postproduction).
Also, other lessons learned from lighting even more shots (this article details my first attempt): less is more, light-linking can be handy, and fog can be a neat way to show depth. Also, render layers are incredibly useful.
So we have a basic room! This is our opening shot. We wanted some natural lighting, solely from the window; pretty stark, pretty gloomy. This is the first render I exported. I'm pretty sure there's just a spot light outside the window, with a tiny area light in the room, and (I think) a slight illuminated fog to get a little lightshaft going.
This one has more fog; it doesn't look so hot, especially the fog due to keeping the render quality low. Apparently fog is pretty intensive to render!
As of now, this is the shot. I created a physical sun and sky with MentalRay, and the background is "lit" enough by a tiny area light to not be too "spooky". However, I think it can be lit more interestingly; The walls and dresser look pretty "meh".
Also, while I still kept the spotlight to really push sun into the room, I also created an area light that spans the window. It's a mental ray "portal light", which works great for situations like these (lighting up dark spaces with just one "hole" for light).
Next step is to figure out render layers! We want to draw in our characters sitting in the two closest chairs, so it would be pretty cool to actually have those on a different render layer/pass! And to get the light-shaft on a different layer would be cool too, to give us some room in post to fine tune it.
Character Design
For Imaginary, I was responsible for creating the imaginary friend character. Right off the bat, I wanted to do something textured; my last big animation, Honey Heist, was pretty much animated with the default (hard, smooth) brush. To me, in retrospect, that was pretty boring, and I didn't want to do it again. Pretty early on we (Robyn and I) decided to make the imaginary friend out of crayon, a "drawing come to life". These drawings were done in TVPaint, and the results of a bunch of character sketches.
What follows is a copy/paste from the Imaginary production blog:
The "imaginary friend" changes quite a bit over the film. But, constantly, he's made to look kind of sloppily drawn in crayon. So here's the major phases of Crayon Buddy's evolution!
He's supposed to eventually be the kid (spoilers!), but at first that's not really the goal. At first he's cute and cuddly, and later he pretty rapidly changes into the kid.
This is his first form; I call it "baby" and "toddler". He gets his "froggy" eyes and green color on the right after seeing a frog in a river.
Now he's a little more active, but still a "kid". He's got legs! He's full of energy, and eventually adopts a red-stripe pattern matching the kid's shirt.
Now we're in school; after a little lesson on dinosaurs in class, he adopts a dinosaur/lizard appearance, that makes some slight changes over time. He's starting to look a little pre-pubescent, a little less exaggerated. We're adding some more color here; oooh, ahhh, orange!
And now we go crazy! These represent some changes that happen during the big montage, the climax of the film. He's kind of rapidly changing, and he's basically a combination of every crayon in the box. He's supposed to get closer to looking like the kid; he gets spikey things that later become "hair", he gains shoulders, loses a tail, his snout becomes more nosey. But more than anything he's supposed to look messy, clashing, and pretty freaky. Notice how deformed he looks in the right pic.
Oh man! Now he's the kid! Wow, what a cool ending!
